When did you first start playing tennis? What appealed to you about the sport when you first picked up a racket and hit the court?
I grew up skateboarding, so since between nine years old and my early/mid-20s, skateboarding was my everything. My parents tried to get me to play tennis as a kid, and I said no. I thought skateboarding was way cooler, so I wanted to skate. Then came Covid. I was working from home, and I missed doing something active while seeing my friends. I fell into a YouTube hole of tennis videos, started reading about the culture, the whole history of tennis and realised that, for so long, tennis has been a driver for change whether it be social, cultural or political. But I didn't feel like that was talked about enough and I felt that when I looked around the space of tennis, everything was either very retro and nostalgia driven or very performance driven. When I grew up skateboarding, whatever I wore to school or to see friends, I would also skate in. But with tennis, you put on your tennis clothes and go to play and then take it off again, so it doesn't really connect with you throughout the different stages of life. It's something that you do on the court, but it doesn't permeate beyond the court, and I think a lot of people that play tennis identify themselves first and foremost as tennis players because it's something that you need to put so much effort into becoming good at. It's something that you do with the community and your friends. It was frustrating to me that I couldn't connect with that in daily life. I started playing tennis five years ago and became so obsessed that I quit my job to start a tennis inspired menswear brand. Now, I play a lot. In summertime, four or five times a week, and in wintertime one to two times a week, it’s harder to get courts then.
Being an outsider coming into tennis is positive because you see it in a new way. Sometimes, when people don't really understand what we're doing, it's the people that have been in tennis forever, because there is this preconceived notion of what tennis is meant to be. When I started playing tennis, I bought a full white outfit. Why? I never wear all white, but that's because that's how tennis had always been shown to me in media and popular culture. I love Wimbledon, I love the tradition of wearing all white, but at Palmes we just want to show that there's not an ultimate truth to what tennis can be as a sport and a culture. So, instead of me getting rid of my personality when I step onto the court and assuming this all-white outfit from traditional tennis, I should bring my sense of individuality and who I am as a person with me onto the court. That means that sometimes I play in a denim shirt - you can play tennis denim shirt easily, it's so nice when it's hot out – I don’t proscribe to this preconceived notion of what tennis is.
When you’re playing tennis, do you play quite competitively?
Oh, hell no! I almost never play for points. Nothing against my friends in the US, but they always want to play for points. There's this American competitiveness. I rarely play for points because if I only have one hour, I want to get as many hits in as I possibly can. I just love the feeling of hitting the ball. If we’re serving – I’m shit at serving, I double fault half the time – I’m not going to get any games in. So, instead of that, if I play with friends, we often just do first to twelve points and then reset. This is actually good advice if you’re starting out playing tennis, because you're going to hit the ball far and wide eight out of ten times the first ten times you go to play. So, if you play for points, then you’re never going to get a rally going, which is the only way to get good at it. When I started playing, I came up with this thing called “death tennis”, which basically means you play until you literally can't walk anymore. The rules: the ball is never out, it can bounce twice - ideally you have to chase it to get it once but if it bounces twice, you just keep playing. If it’s far and wide you still have to run to get it. This means that: A) you get a ton of exercise, and B) you get so many hits in. The ball is always active, and you get to hit it at really uncomfortable angles which will benefit your game later on. It’s muscle memory.
Starting out, I didn't get any coaching for the first two or three years because I grew up skateboarding and you don't go to skateboard school! You just learn it autonomously. I would never advise anyone to do that with tennis because you pick up a lot of bad habits. I tell all my friends to just get five lessons with a coach when they’re starting, because they will give you the basics and then you can build on to it, but you have the essentials. If you pick up bad habits, it's going to take years to unlearn them.
The UK has a longstanding relationship with tennis, of course. Is there a big tennis culture in Copenhagen?
We're very much a football country and I think it's because we don't have any public courts. The UK has public courts, the US has public courts, France has public courts, Germany has public courts. In Denmark, we don't have a single public court. The city doesn't build them for some reason. Tennis has never been in our culture because we've historically never had great tennis athletes. Look at Sweden, they have a ton of courts, probably because of Bjorn Borg in the ‘70s, so tennis became a Swedish sport after that. The UK is where tennis is from originally, so obviously there are a lot of courts here because it's in the culture. We had Caroline Wozniacki, who was the female number one fifteen years ago, but before that we’ve never had any. Now, we have Holger Rune, who’s in and out of the top twenty. He’s been injured for a while unfortunately, but it’s just not in the culture as prevalently. The problem is if you move to Copenhagen, you just can’t play. There are two to four year waiting lists for all the clubs. There’s maybe one court that is pay and play, but it’s shit so I wouldn’t advise it. Palmes is a response to what I saw as a cultural barrier of entry into tennis, in the sense that so many people are standing from the outside looking into tennis, thinking “I don’t fit in with what I see”, because what they see and how it has always been shown is upper class and traditional. I love the tradition and I love things that are a little old school, but if you don't identify with that, you're not going to go into tennis because there was nothing that showed tennis in a more progressive and forward-thinking way. I always say that if a person is an island and tennis is another island, Palmes is the bridge that they can walk across into the world of tennis.
Because of how inaccessible tennis courts are in Copenhagen, last year we made this initiative where we rented out all the courts at my local club, every Saturday at 8am. People could sign up on our website and show up to have free tennis lessons with coaches we hired using rackets we provided and then we all went to the Palmes shop afterwards to have coffee and pastries. We met so many people who had never played before but had wanted to because they couldn’t get into a club, they didn’t know anyone who played and they couldn’t play themselves. If I had a running brand, it would be easy – we could just meet a bunch of people out front on the street and go for a run. With tennis there are so many barriers to entry that we are slowly trying to break down. That was always the idea when I started Palmes. We're based in Copenhagen and not a lot of people realise that, because our design language is more vintage American sportswear. I didn't want Palmes to feel Danish because, while I love being from Denmark, I think tennis is a global feeling that you can connect with wherever you're from. It doesn't really matter as long as you have a love for tennis, you can connect with our brand, and we want to invite you into what we call the Palmes Tennis Society. We didn't want it to be tied to any geographic location in any way but defined by our approach to tennis.
